Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx

$12.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

E. Annie Proulx's "Accordion Crimes" is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their succe ssive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past -- voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx's prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language make "Accordion Crimes" a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality. ...Show more

The Voyage of the Narwhal - A Novel by Andrea Barrett

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

A major novel by the author of Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for fiction. Part adventure, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration. Combining fact and fiction, the story focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a 19th-century scholar/ naturalist and his expedition to search for an open polar sea. ...Show more

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

From the bestselling author of "The Little Stranger "and "Fingersmith," an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London. It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa--a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants--life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the "clerk class," the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life--or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, "The Paying Guests" is Sarah Waters's finest achievement yet. ...Show more

Atonement by Ian McEwan

$15.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life. In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In "Atonement "he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. "Atonement" is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound-and profoundly moving-exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution. ...Show more

George Orwell Complete Novels: Burmese Days; A Clergyman's Daughter; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Coming Up For Air; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

$150.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: near fine

The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel

$30.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Series: The Wolf Hall Trilogy | Reading Level: very good

The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Thomas Cromwell trilogy. ‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’ England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.     ...Show more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

$25.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: near fine

When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison, or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over.over.

The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

$30.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

This beautifully haunting book by Booker winner Ian McEwan won a 1987 Whitbread Prize The Child in Time opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his 3-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his at tention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. Just like that. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself. ...Show more

Inland by Gerald Murnane

$25.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: good-very good

Inland (1989) is a dispersed, sprawling narrative, a set of texts interlocked by a myriad of narratives, a work that could be described as postmodern for its intricate examination of meaning. It challenges our interpretations of space and time, as if we were looking in another way, not out to the gliste ning ocean surrounding our island, perhaps, but inland, where dreams are real. Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. From 1960 to 1973, he worked as a teacher and developed educational publications. He published his first novel in 1974. In 1980, he became a lecturer, whilst continuing to write. Gerald won the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award for Velvet Waters in 1991. He received the Patrick White Literary Award in 1999. He currently lives in Melbourne. ...Show more

Kinsey and Me: Stories by Sue Grafton

$12.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed, bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two, unmarried, and physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with my feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and tossed a photograph on my desk. 'S omebody killed my husband.' Thirty one years since A is for Alibi was first published, Sue Grafton presents Kinsey & Me, her first compendium of short stories. It features nine Kinsey Millhone short stories, each a gem of detection, as well as autobiographical pieces written in the decade after Grafton's mother died. Together, they show just how much Kinsey Millhone is a distillation of her creator's past, even as they reveal a child who, free of parental discipline, read everything and roamed everywhere. But the dark side of such freedom was that very parental distance ...Kit walked through the empty house, listening to her footsteps resounding against the pale dead floors ...the windows stood open to the summer heat and a wind that smelled of lilacs touched at the screens. From her bedroom, she could look out into the side yard where the cherry tree had blossomed every April since time began ...And now the house was being sold and the land, their mother was dead, their father remarried: all of life, everything was breaking apart, breaking down, being levelled, destroyed, razed, rendered obsolete, that childhood, that life, that family as odd and unhappy as it had been ...Published in the UK for the first time, this dazzling and often moving collection displays the depth and range of Grafton's writing and reminds us of her unique talent as a storyteller. ...Show more

Liberty - A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

Just in time for the Fourth of July, a firecracker of a Lake Wobegon novel from bestselling author and radio storyteller Garrison Keillor Published to wide and enthusiastic acclaim, Liberty is Garrison Keillor's most ribald Lake Wobegon novel yet, set in a spectacular Fourth of July celebration amid mar ching bands and circus wagons drawn by teams of Percherons. The Chairman of the Fourth, Clint Bunsen, is in the midst of an identity crisis brought on by a DNA test just as he turns sixty, and he finds solace in the arms of Angelica Pflame, the young beauty who marched as Liberty in last year's parade. Should he remain in Lake Wobegon with his stoical wife Irene or fly to California with Angelica? Liberty is Keillor at his knowing, deadpan, raconteur best. ...Show more

The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka

$14.00 NZD

Category: Hardback fiction | Reading Level: very good

At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi leaves behind her childhood among the mango trees of Ceylon for married life across the ocean in Malaysia, and soon finds herself struggling to raise a family in a country that is, by turns, unyielding and amazing, brutal and beautiful. Giving birth to a child every year until she is nineteen, Lakshmi becomes a formidable matriarch, determined to secure a better life for her daughters and sons. From the Japanese occupation during World War II to the torture of watching some of her children succumb to life s most terrible temptations, she rises to face every new challenge with almost mythic strength. Dreamy and lyrical, told in the alternating voices of the men and women of this amazing family, The Rice Mother gorgeously evokes a world where small pleasures offset unimaginable horrors, where ghosts and gods walk hand in hand. It marks the triumphant debut of a writer whose wisdom and soaring prose will touch readers, especially women, the world over." ...Show more